Data science startup PipeCandy is sales team's best freind on field

If a company targeting the retail industry approaches a conventional data provider, the company would receive basic details like the names of top retail companies, its managers, their contact details, while leaving the rest to be figured out by sales representatives.

However, PipeCandy, a data science startup based out of Chennai tracks industry-specific nuances and provides those insights to sales representatives to make their sales pitches more relevant to the sector and company they are targeting.

Founded in February 2016 by three friends Shrikanth Jagannathan, Ashwin Ramasamy and Murali Vivekanandan, PipeCandy currently tracks over 100 million decision makers across 40 million companies globally covering retail, ecommerce, mobile and SaaS industries with an aim to expand to other sectors like real estate, healthcare and finance.

“We compute all the variables of the client and provide it to the sales reps,“ said Ramasamy. “For example, with an ecommerce client, we can give more specific details about the kind of app downloads do they have, if they have offline services, if they have a warehouse, what kind of reviews does the company have, among other things.“

The company counts Freshdesk, Zarget, FarEye and Shyp as some of its clients and aims to reach a total of 100 customers by July. “Typically, if a company sends outbound emails to a prospective client, the open rate is that of 15-20%. However, with PipeCandy, our customers have experienced an open rate of 70-90% and response rate has increased from 1 in 100 to 12 in 100,“ said Ramasamy.Reason for the spike in response, he explains, is because the subject line and content of the email are concise and personalised as opposed to a generic one.

There are multiple ways in which PipeCandy collects data. The company has data par tners which helps them with the basic details like name, contact details and for industry-specific information and they also scour through public websites, social profiles, among other sources.

The startup recently raised $1.1 million in seed funding from IDG Ventures India, Axilor Ventures, Emergent Ventures and Indian Angel Network. “Most enterprises only use a tiny fraction of available data for sales prospecting. Moreover, they don't use that data effectively,“ said Ankur Jain from Emergent Ventures. “PipeCandy is building a sales team's best friend.“

PipeCandy also plans to extend their expertise in creating a platform to provide professional graphs of companies and employees. “We would attempt to build professional profiles with in-depth insights, so that people know what to expect when they approach a certain company or employee of that company,“ added Ramasamy.